Resonance with a Damped-Driven Mass-Spring System in Python

Rhett Allain
10 min readNov 6, 2020
Photo: Rhett Allain

Physicists like to say that pretty much everything can be modeled as just a mass connected to a spring. I mean, it’s not completely untrue. The mass on a spring appears in lots of different problems. But what about an oscillating mass WITH some type of frictional force? What about a mass-spring with a driving force? This is what we are going to build — in python. It’s going to be awesome.

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Rhett Allain

Physics faculty, science blogger of all things geek. Technical Consultant for CBS MacGyver and MythBusters. WIRED blogger.